Saturday, 31 October 2015

My
beautiful mama grew up on a farm in a small Yorkshire village. Her father left
it to her brother, and my childhood school holidays often included a journey up
to Yorkshire to stay with my Grandma in her bungalow – the last house in the
village, beside a field of red wheat – and visits to my uncle and auntie and
cousins in the old farm. I remember it so vividly; the bullocks by the field
gate, their breath steaming in the winter cold, the grain pouring down the
hopper into sacks in the barn, dust rising in the slanting sunbeams.

It
was a busy household when my beautiful mama was a child. Her mother did the
books for the farm and kept the poultry; the care of the children and the
household chores were undertaken by Suzy, a kindly, round person whom I never
saw out of an apron, her hair combed back into a bun. Her face was like an
Albanian’s. Her husband George did the hedges and ditches.

Besides
Suzy and George, there were the horsemen. They lived in the outbuildings, and
my grandfather went every year to the fair to hire the horsemen for the year.
As well as them, prisoners of war worked on the land. And of course there were
other men – shepherds and various merchants, who came to the farm. And there
were the animals – dogs, cows, hens, sheep; but no pigs that I remember.

In
my beautiful mama’s childhood, the people spoke broad Yorkshire; and still
today the accent is pronounced in the Yorkshire branch of our family – and I
love it. My grandfather, my father’s father, knew the words of broad Yorkshire.

But
many of the old phrases have gone. There’s a word, brussen, which can mean
‘very full’ – like ‘bursting’. But my beautifl mama remembers it as they word
they used for doing up, or fastening, braces (US suspenders). ‘Brussen tha
galuses’ meant ‘fasten your braces’, she tells me.

Nowhere
else have I come across that phrase, until recently when I was reading a book
by a young man who left his Amish family for life in the mainstream. He
commented that the Amish word for braces/suspenders was ‘galuses’.

I
wonder how it travelled? The Amish broke away from the Mennonites, who
originated in Switzerland. Switzerland has both French and German. Some of the
tribes populating Old England were Germanic. So I wonder if the word is very
old and started from Germany, infiltrating German Swiss and Old English?

I
thought perhaps it originated from England and crossed the Atlantic with the
Pilgrim Fathers, finding its was into American Amish in due course. Except that
the Amish are so closed and separate a society that there may not be much
cross-fertilisation with the language of mainstream culture. I’m not sure.

The
roots and drifts and wind-borne seeds of language intrigue and delight me. And
Yorkshire, even after all these years in the alien south, still feels like home.
I grew up in the south-east, but all
my family were Yorkshire people. I still miss it. The northern outlook,
mannerisms and attitudes are very different from those of the south.

Wednesday, 28 October 2015

In
England we have been thinking hard about tax credit cuts in the last week or
two. Our chancellor’s position (put simply and ignoring glaring anomalies like
Trident and wanting to go ahead with a nuclear power station that will be the
most expensive building on the planet) is that national economic security is
achieved by austerity – which in practice means cutting benefits to people on low incomes who have been relying on
them.

Meanwhile
over in America, Obama has initiated a long overdue return to teacher-inspired,
child-centred, holistic education. What other kind is there, one might ask,
assuming the word ‘education’ to be correctly used.

Under
the present administration in England, we are still going full steam ahead on
the numbers game in education – it’s all about tests and results.

Well,
there’s outcome, isn’t there; but there’s also process. As they say, the end
doesn’t justify the means. The road you travel is as important as the
destination – arguably more so.

The
economic argument of austerity-descending-into-misery for the poor, as a means
of stabilizing the economy, doesn’t hold up for a minute in any real world, but
there is a definite parity between the chancellor’s drive to achieve prosperity
by cutting income, and the education minister’s drive to achieve academic excellence
by focusing on test results.

Such
an approach is doomed to failure for the simple reason that it’s the wrong way
round. Bottom line: you won’t get a harvest if you don’t sow any seeds.

It
all made me think about the words of Jesus in Mark’s gospel (16:17), ‘signs
shall follow them that believe’.

The
order there is crucial.

There
is a temptation, in Signs and Wonders circles, to drift into them that believe
pursuing signs; and that doesn’t work. Once you get results-fixated disciples,
you end up with neither disciples nor signs. Just anxiety and disappointment,
power games, disillusionment and ultimately loss of faith.

You
have to walk the path you believe and not look back, not look over your
shoulder. Then the signs will follow you.

The
same with the economy. If you look after the wellbeing of the people, then it
will prosper all by itself.

Same
with education. If you tend the wellbeing of the child, then education will
happened naturally; children love to learn, they just can’t help it. When my
kids were little I never checked their homework, never asked about their test
results, never insisted they revise for exams. I told them it didn’t matter if
they failed their exams, that passing an exam in a subject you hated could be a
terrible mistake because you could end up in an occupation you didn’t like as a
result. When my smallest child had trouble learning to read, I went to the
school and insisted they take off all pressure and concentrate on seeing to it
that she was happy and had a nice time. I said if that was impossible for them, I’d understand – I’d take her out of school.

I
didn’t do this because I didn’t care if my children failed but because I wanted
them to succeed. They did. They all did amazingly well. It has to be the right
way round – signs following disciples, not disciples following signs. In
health, in education, in economics, in the practice of our faith. Love,
generosity, confidence, trust, kindness, integrity, understanding – let these
lead the way and all the rest will follow.

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An Inspiration

‘Let us pass through your country. We will stay on the main road; we will not turn aside to the right or to the left. Sell us food to eat and water to drink for their price in silver. Only let us pass through on foot until we cross the Jordan into the land the Lord our God is giving us.’

(Deuteronomy 2.27-28, 29b NIV UK)

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Pen

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